Atheism

i dont know. i wonder similar things. in that my first wife, who i miss so dearly, died 14 years ago. she was catholic. i keep thinking to myself, i miss her so much that i hope it’s all true so i could see her again. sort of like a pascal’s wager of sort.

sigh. anyway. you got this.

Identify inaccuracies in this book and realize there is nothing reliable coming out of it.

If you read a dictionary that had hundreds of incorrect definitions why would you trust any of its definitions?

Also this isn't that graphic, the universe is way more terrifying than any passage here. The universe, black holes, radiation, the inside of a star, most planet's surfaces are far more hostile to life than a place of fire. Fire is quite literally almost key to survival.

I've largely dealt with the same as you are dealing with right now. It used to drive me crazy and I'd wake up from nightmares bathing in sweat.

There's no "if this then that" formula to fix it right away. There's also nothing wrong with you. The human psyche has many layers and it's gonna take time and therapy to get it out of them.

What worked for me is:

-join groups (online or irl) that deal with post religious trauma syndrome. You are absolutely not alone.

-confront the sources of what your fears are built on by looking up historical context (religion for breakfast on youtube is a very powerful tool for that).

-go easy on yourself. This gonna take some time. Don't despair if you feel like it's never gonna go away. It will, gradually.

Keep in mind that you've probably had to live with a god looking over your shoulder who demanded perfection. That takes a huge toll on your system.

You're on the road to recovery. Best of luck and again, don't despair, it's ok to slip up.

Edit: it also helps to look back sometimes. Think of what things you used to believe vs how you look at them now. It's easy to lose sight of the progress you have made in comparison to how loud these feelings can get.

Look man, I've already been dead once and have nothing to report so maybe that helps.

Therapy! You've likely been traumatized. You need to deal with the trauma. Logic helps the mind, but you need the heart to heal.

*personal experience, religion traumatized me and it took years after becoming an atheist to get over my fear of hell. If I had to do it again I'd definitely do it with a therapist.

If you truly believe that hell exists and you fear punishment in the afterlife, then you are still fundamentally religious at heart.

I don't choose not to believe in hell, nor do I choose not to believe in the words of the Bible, Torah, Quran, or other dogma from other religions. I simply never believed them in the first place. I don't fear being wrong and being punished in the afterlife, because I don't believe in heaven, hell, gods or devils. (And even if I did believe in a god, I would never believe in one that is so petty that they would smite me for having doubts or other beliefs.)

In my view, fear is used by religious authorities to control people, so that they will submit without question to arbitrary rules and limitations that they would not otherwise follow. Fear and reward are great motivators.

I don't think you can truly be free until you have broken free from the shackles of fear that were designed to keep you in line with the teachings of your former religion. You are still being controlled by that fear today because you still aren't sure whether you believe or not.

Just be excellent to one another. No matter whether or not Marcus Aurelius actually said this, this quote helped me a lot when I was younger, emphasis on the first two lines:

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

How did you get rid of your fear of the Greek Tartarus or the Norse Hel or etc... Same way.

I tend to take a credo quia absurdum approach to a lot of these arguments. If there are omniscient/omnipotent beings they would have to be, by definition, beyond our ability to understand. So it’s ridiculous to think that despite that some group of people would figure out exactly the right rules by which these things would want us to behave.

Be a good person. Help others. Pay it forward. And regardless of whether there are gods or not, you will have done your small part to make the world a bit better.

I wasn’t quite brought up to the same extent, but fear of hell was a big one for us too. It still bothers me occasionally, if I’m honest, and probably always will. A thorn in the mind that was embedded as a child that I’m still trying to dislodge. (And another reason I never wanted my kids to be raised in the church.)

Here’s the thing that comforts and challenges me, beyond the Marcus Aurelius quote that had already been posted— How do you know it’s the Christian God waiting for you? What if it’s Odin? Anubis? Zeus? Allah? What if you end up in Valhalla? Why do you fear being bad for Jesus and not Santa Claus? Just be a good person. I’d rather be evaluated for my own successes and failures than get in just because I’m friends with the homeowner’s kid.

Finally, if you have the opportunity and ability to, I would also highly recommend watching The Good Place.

Hopefully this is a take that's different from the ones other people offered you; I was Agnostically Abrahamic-adjacent into my mid twenties and still grappled with the possibility that I was going to inevitably be tortured at the end of my life by something. Psychological residue of religious abuse.

But here is kind of where I'm at now: we can't know if there will or won't be torture. If you can't help but feel like it's coming then just live a life that's worthy of you now. This is all the info we have to work with and being good to eachother probably matters more than whatever consequence awaits us. I think I'd still feel that way in the worst possible outcome. After a while separated from any churches, the fear of being punished slowly subsides and you can just live your life.

I hope you reach that point in your journey soon. Reach out if you ever need to talk about it.

If a god exists, we have no way of knowing anything about them. Religion is something humans made up to guess at the nature of a god, but it's nothing more than guessing. There is no reason to think any of these guesses would be anywhere close to true, let alone which guess would be the correct one.

Many major religions all preach that if you don't believe this specific religion, you will be doomed to hell for all eternity. But since religion is nothing more than a guess, they're really saying that you will be damned for guessing wrong. Even if we accepted that one of these might be true, we still aren't any closer to knowing which one, which guess won't send you to hell.

These religions also speak of a just and loving god. But if god was truly just and loving, would he really torture you forever just for guessing wrong? Does that make sense?

All you can really do is try to live a good life and strive to always do the right thing. If a god does exist, if that god is truly just and loving, then surely the life you lived should be far more important than the guess you made.

The naive idea of Hell (no pun intended) is on its face absurd. We know that cognition and sensation come from physical processes (the brain, body and nervous system) from observing how these things fail and what happens. As such, the idea of an eternal fire that burns you without the escape of death is impossible: even if the nerves that sense the agony of their own destruction were magically regenerated, the nervous system would shut down.

Theologians dealing with people who saw through this acknowledged it and reframed Hell as something more philosophical: the absence of the presence of God and such, with the assumption that knowing that the big man in the sky loves you is the one thing that makes life worth living. This assumption has also been refuted: Existentialist philosophy, for example, makes short shrift of it: yes, there is no God, no grand narrative, and no ultimate universal meaning to our lives, so why bother living? Because we make our own meaning as we interact with others and engage with the world. No existentialist would fear this Hell if it existed, because they’d be making their own fun in the cold, unhallowed darkness.

Also, if Satan is the bad guy, why is he working as the good guy’s jailer and torturing those who were insufficiently respectful to him? That part makes no sense.

Hell isn't real, neither is heaven. I died for a little bit and came back, if they hadn't told me my heart stopped, I never would have known.

It may help if you realize that "God" is unknowable and that there are as many possible scenarios where following that religion gets you punished as there are where not following that religion gets you punished

A simple thought exercise that helped me was the telephone game.

We can never know a true message from a supreme being, because whatever message we received would have been perverted by the time we heard it. Humans would have changed the word in order to win arguments. Therefore any true message is a varying degree of wrong.

I like to live my live the way Bill & Ted teach. Be excellent to each other, and party on dude. That order is important. We must be excellent to each other first, then we can party on dude.

Fear is non-specific first, and specific second. The way you treat specific fear is with non-specific interventions. When you feel the fear, breathe. Inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of 2, and exhale for a count of 6 or 8. Do that a few times until your body calms down. Treat the fear as fear first.

Then, treat the belief. Repeat something like "Even though I am afraid of , I am safe here and now". Over a period of weeks this helps your body stop responding with fear to your mind's habitual beliefs.

Then treat the meta-belief. Recognize that the people who raised you - not just your parents but literally every relative, imam, community member, teacher, etc - they all lied to you for the explicit purpose of getting you to adopt a nervous system response that would torture you into compliant behaviors. They literally turned your own body against you, and they did it on purpose. "Spare the rod, spoil the child" is not merely an excuse to hit children, it's an explicit acknowledgement that by beating children you permanently change their brain to betray them and flood them with anxiety and fear even just for having private thoughts.

Once you have treated the physiological fear and started to address the cognitive fear, anger can help bring you clarity. From that clarity you can then move on to acceptance and forgiveness on your own terms.